If you’ve used Tweepi, this situation may sound familiar, and you probably need this Twitter hack. You have an aggressive goal to grow your brand’s follower base–and fast. As you follow new people, many tweet back thrilled that an organization they love is now following them. Some have been fans and followers for years. But your following-to-follower ratio is creeping ever higher.

This is exactly the situation I found myself in recently. I wanted to preserve a healthy follow ratio, but with all that excitement, I didn’t want to risk unfollowing any of the brand’s uber-fans. How to separate the wheat from the chaff–at scale?

I discovered an easy way to solve that problem through IFTTT (If This Then That). If you haven’t used it before, IFTTT allows you to link different online tools to execute more complex tasks. Each set of actions is called a “recipe.”

For example, if a user posts on my hashtag on Instagram, then email me a link to the post. If rain is predicted tomorrow, then trigger an iPhone notification. If I need to get out of a meeting, call my phone. (For real!) They have a whole section of recipes to streamline social media that every social media pro should be aware of. Try it out — the more you use it, the more uses you’ll find for it.

The Solution

Back to my problem. Through IFTTT, I created two recipes: one that dumps out a list of accounts that mention my brand’s Twitter account to a Google Drive spreadsheet (Recipe 293233), and another that dumps a list of usernames whose tweets I’ve faved (Recipe 293235).

Since my brand is mentioned a lot, I created the second one as a more manual workaround in case I wanted to identify a select group of people. (I manually faved tweets thanking us for following them.) Then I let the recipes run until I had a solid list of usernames.

Once you have your list of accounts, the rest is easy. Go to the Follow Tools dropdown in Tweepi and click on By copy/paste. Then simply copy your list of usernames from Drive and paste them into the field. Hit Submit and then safelist your best fans, using any additional filters you need (who’s following you back, location, etc.).

Less manual solution (all mentions):

More manual solution (faved tweets only):

Which recipe you use depends on what your ideal follow ratio is, and your bandwidth for manually faving certain users’ tweets. I ended up using the latter.

I found my Tweepi/IFTTT Twitter hack to be a very useful tool to scale up a Twitter following while nurturing true fans. I hope you do as well!